You have a valid question. More so when you have 4G, great smart phones and latest tablets. You have been using voice and data for years and have been rightly wondering to use blog or not. You have concerns regarding ROI from blogging.

Opportunity Cost (If I don’t blog, what do I do, and use of resources is what? How valued? or being paid for the time saved due to not blogging by doing something else: If it is more than 60,000 USD you can add the differential to total cost because either we should take cost of time or opportunity and delta in case the opportunity cost is higher)

Benefits (ROI) from Blogging

4 values to be considered:

1. Comparative Value: The value f asset created through Blogs. A number of tools help here: Simply Google blog worth or blog value; and get tools that user either uses in bound links or number of visitors, blog growth, feed subscribers and so on, to compute comparative value of blogs.

2. Direct Value: Make money off your blog through AdSense or other services to display alongside your blog or maintain a job board, place ads in their feeds, find related business, gain referral or recommendations etc.

4. Unquantifiable value: On the blog email address, phone number etc are mentioned. Many people may write and can start a new relationship which was not possible otherwise. It can turn into happiness, joy, satisfaction of business which was not otherwise likely.

In nutshell, through business blogs 6 business metrics can be achieved.

a) Raw author contribution

b) Audience Growth

c) Conversation Rate

d) Citation/Ripple index

e) Costs

f) Benefits

As long as the costs are less than benefits and joy/happiness more than pain, the ROI of blogging is positive. By putting exact values one can calculate ROI = {(Profit -Cost)/Cost} X 100

Costs and benefits are already explained. The other 4 metrics are explained hereunder:

1. Raw author contributions or do I deserve to be successful?

Posts per month = # of posts / # of months

Content created = # of words in a post / # of posts

It can be calculated in WordPress by downloading relevant plug-in or use Joost’s plug-in if there are more than 1 author on the blog site.

2) Holistic audience growth or is anyone reading my content? This can be calculated from the RSS feeds sign up by the readers, then tools like FeedBurner can compute offsite audience growth (RSS subscribers).

3) Conversation ratio or are we having a conversation?

Conversation rate = # of visitor comments/# of posts. One can also look into positive, negative, neutral conversation as well as net promoter score, etc. One can also apply detailed text and sentiment analytics for digging deeper values.

4) Citations and Ripple Index or Are people talking about my blog/me/my company? Am I causing any ripple?

Citation metrics

Technorati Authority (the number of unique blogs that link to your blog in last 6 months)

Tweet Citations (A measure of how many people tweet about your post)

Authority of blog will measure the number of blogs that have discussed something related to your blog and linked back to you.

Tweettheme helps to compute ripple caused by tweets of people who have link to an individual post, talked about it and passed it on to others.

The other benefits are the cross connection of various SM efforts where integrated marketing helps better. In this connection Blogs bring in value like diamond in the crown, the value which is brought in by an effective blogs increases the sum total of total value and effectiveness. Blogs add gross value in a way which makes all other Social Media and even traditional media become more effective as well as rewarding.

Conclusion

Blogging is the central tool and the hub of your digital media marketing plan. The way you are responsible for your small medium business, same way your blog will take care of deeper questions while leading your own digital media marketing efforts. Blag can easily connect with your Social Media channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, Email etc.

Blog will provide you a superb opportunity to improve your search engine optimization ranking, will work as a hub to the spokes of social media and digital marketing efforts. Blog will give you an opportunity to engage with your stakeholders in an interactive way.

Do write your comments about the usefulness of blogs in your business, forward this blog to your friends and family.